18 Mar 2008

Restoring the computational balance

Sir Bonar writes:

I think there is a balance in society which has been lost, and I believe we can use technology to restore it.

If we think back 50 years, what we knew about ourselves as a country was held centrally on a single computer installation owned by the Central Computer Agency. Housewives who wished to calculate their weekly expenditure on groceries would use the back of an envelope. Accountants would calculate taxation for small businesses using a comptometer

The “processing balance”, as I call it, lay very much at the centre of society. And perhaps it is no coincidence that these were stable and happy times, when Britain punched above its weight, the police were generally trusted and youth well behaved.

Now, of course, every Tom, Dick and Harry has a device no larger than a ladies’ powder puff which can forecast weather, play poker and map speed cameras while working out new ways to avoid tax. I’ve seen children play illicit simulation games on their mobile telephones. Drug dealers use Blackberries and Twittering to evade law enforcement.

The balance, as it were, has been lost.

Much as we might like to turn the clock back, none of us can do that. To restore the status quo ante, we must go forward.

At the heart of government in the golden era we used to have three secret Lyons Electronic Offices with 8kb of store each. At that time the average man on the Clapham Omnibus (a Routemaster, I might add) had at most a slide rule in his top pocket. In simple computational terms, to restore that balance of power we at the heart of government would now need several thousand times the computational power of 50 million personal computers.

By my reckoning, the technical specification would be a 256 terahertz computer with 512 petabytes of RAM offering 170 teraflops of processing power. Of course it would need no more than 505,000 keyboards and a similar number of VDUs attached (given that Civil Service numbers have dropped so sharply in recent years) and also 505,000 mice. These devices would be attached to the central processor by means of 1,515,000 wires of varying length.

We had a most encouraging meeting with our suppliers over a champagne reception at Somerset House. They’re very positive about the plan, and assure me it is entirely feasible. They’ve just constructed what they call a computational smelter large enough to simulate the various wars the US is now contemplating. And the whole thing would fit into a space no larger than MoD Main Building.

If we were simply to make this one investment, we would then have the only computer government would need. We could replace the chaos of all the different computers in one go. We would invest now, in order to save for years to come. It made an awful lot of sense to me.

Above all I think it would go a long way, by restoring the computational balance in society, to restoring social harmony and cohesion. I predict it would restore trust and deference to properly accountable authority.

I wonder what others think?

Posted by Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom GCMG KCVO on 18/03/08 at 9:41am
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